Hernan Lorenzi, PhD

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Bio

Hernan Lorenzi, PhD is an assistant professor in the Infectious Disease Group at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). His research is currently focused on understanding how protozoan parasites and bacteria evolve and interact with the human host to cause disease. Dr. Lorenzi’s lab uses a combination of next generation sequencing technologies and bioinformatics approaches to elucidate the effect of microbial, parasite and host genetics on human disease, and assists in the development of vaccines and novel therapeutic treatments. Dr. Lorenzi has led several NIAID-funded studies to characterize the genomes and assess the population diversity of human pathogens and related organism, including Cryptosporidium muris, Toxoplasma gondii, Hammondia hammondi, Gragarina niphandrodes and hundreds of strains of different Paramyxovirus species. He has also played a key role in the annotation and analysis of several human parasites including Plasmodium vivax, Trypanosoma cruzi, several Entamoeba species, and developed novel sequence analysis pipelines.

Currently Dr. Lorenzi’s lab is applying high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics analyses to study host-pathogen interactions in Toxoplasmosis and protective immunity in Malaria using whole genome sequencing, mRNA/miRNA transcriptomics, 16S and SNP analyses, comparative genomics, and chemical mutagenesis. In addition, they are carrying out a number of studies to investigate the role of the microbiome on Human health, including two projects funded by NASA to evaluate the impact of long-term space travel on the Astronauts’ microbiome and to investigate the effect of different kinds of diet on the Astronauts’ microbiome and health.

Dr. Lorenzi has a bachelor's degree in biology and a PhD in parasite genomics from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thereafter, he pursued a post-doctoral fellowship at the laboratory of Dr. Roger Reeves, Johns Hopkins University, where he studied memory impairment in Down syndrome.

Research Priorities

Elucidation of molecular mechanisms of host-parasite interaction in Toxoplasmosis.

Identification of novel molecular targets for the development of antiparasitic drugs using parasite mutagenesis. genome sequencing, SNP analysis and RNAseq.

Genomic characterization of Toxoplasma gondii worldwide diversity and its association with parasite’s virulence.